Small Landscape with St Paul's No. 1

In a recent review in the New York Times, the chief art critic, Roberta Smith, wrote about a Kossoff exhibition shown in London, New York and Los Angeles (in which this painting was included). ‘Kossoff’ she wrote, ‘is among the most accomplished painters of the late 20th and early 21st Century … his greatness lies in the extreme way he pits the two basic realities of painting — the actual paint surface and the image depicted — against each another.’ She went on to compare him to Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, whose reputations she felt ‘unfairly overshadowed Kossoff’s, thanks in part to their colourfulness of their private lives. But this may pass’.

Kossoff’s personal life poured into his paintings: a private, passionate existence centred around his studio, his family and friends, and London. He was a true Londoner, born in the East End (‘within the sound of Bow Bells’), and who lived and worked in London for the rest of his life. The ebb and flow of the city was a constant stimulus - the way it was continually evolving, from its partial destruction during the Second World War to its renewal in the decades that followed. His paintings build on this theme, charting the flow of the city’s life within the great theatre of its buildings, streets, churches, stations and citizens, ever conscious of the history and geography that have shaped it. ‘The London of my memory,’ he wrote in 1995, ‘ is not the real city I live in today. Sometimes now it seems like a monster that draws you into its complicated inside. Yet, though changing all the time, its particular location – the river, the hills, the proximity to the sea – seems always present’.

As with Constable, the hint of the sea or the river is never far away in Kossoff’s landscapes (as he liked to call his cityscapes), no matter how inner urban they appear to be. Here, in this small early landscape, the river Thames flows just beyond the horizon line, the dawn light reflecting off its watery surface. Kossoff had begun painting in the area around St Paul’s two years earlier, when he moved studios from Mornington Crescent to Bethnal Green. St Paul’s cathedral, the largest Protestant church in the world, had been hailed as a symbol of national resistance during the war, when incendiary bombs had destroyed much of the area around it, but had somehow managed to leave the great building unscathed. Other artists of the period painted the cathedral as a miraculous survivor. Kossoff saw it as a lone sentinel, standing proud on Ludgate Hill, but eclipsed by the building work that was going on in the foreground. His concern with process, flux and generation lies at the heart of nearly all his work. Here, in this small, almost deliquescent work, transformation seems to be taking place before our very eyes, the formlessness of the building site fluctuating and developing into just-recognisable shape as the brushstrokes surge across the board.

The scene is of a building site close to Threadneedle Street, with St. Paul’s and a road leading up to it on the right, the cathedral itself perched at the top right corner of the painting. A builder’s hut stands out on the left, while the excavations in the centre, painted in warm earth colours, seem to have transplanted themselves onto the board, as if paint and image were one and the same thing: ‘a little piece of the curved surface of the earth’, as Helen Lessore, Kossoff’s first dealer, described the work. What makes this painting from the late 1950s so singular and contemporary is how vividly Kossoff captures the moment when an image coheres before our eyes, yet still threatens to dissolve into abstraction.

We are very grateful to Andrea Rose for preparing this catalogue entry.